


No matter how many breaths that you took, you still couldn’t breathe

by mad_medium



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dream Bubble, Gen, Human Experimentation, Hurt/Comfort, John/Karkat friendship, Kink Meme, More hurt than comfort right now, Post-Sburb, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-11
Updated: 2012-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-29 09:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 19,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/318262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad_medium/pseuds/mad_medium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The trolls recreated Alternia and went back there. The kids were trapped in their session, so both parties agreed to get the kids to Alternia too to think of some brilliant solution. But something went very, very wrong...</p><p>Lost in the universe of a very violent race, the kids struggle for survival, when Karkat desperately tries to orchestrate a rescue attempt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for kinkmeme. The thread with the prompt is here: http://homesmut.livejournal.com/14212.html?thread=25822852#t25822852
> 
> The title is a line from 30 Seconds to Mars song, Hurricane.

EB: karkat we did it, we actually made it happen, we are here! just like you said we would, we are...

Your message could not be delivered because you are offline. Please check your internet connection.

EB: wait a sec let me check...

Your message could not be delivered because you are offline. Please check your internet connection.

EB: ...somewhere...

Your message could not be delivered because you are offline. Please check your internet connection.

## John: Be past John

You got everything. Four of you were not only god tiers, you were top of the god tiers, gained so many levels that you lost count weeks ago. Conquered barely opposing Derse, built consort civilizations with complicated and distinct cultures, ectocloned and alchemized pretty much everything any of you ever imagined. The Medium was yours to command and rule.

Or at least you would be, said Doomed Dave trying to fix everything once more. Your session was empty, unwinnable, devoid of any meaning, as Jack Noir the unbeatable enemy escaped it and all that left didn’t matter at all.

The trolls were doing much better. Somehow they managed to restore their universe to quite a usable state, with them alive on Alternia. There were minute differences, they reported, like with their Ancestors alive outside of their timeframes, but it was way better than having no planet at all, with no universe to boot. How they did it was unclear even for them, but the basics as Karkat explained were:

CG: YOU HAVE TO ACTUALLY WIN THE GAME, YOU MORON.

Not that they haven’t their own problems, like Jack Noir gone missing and by all accounts last seen in their universe, but at least they got something useful to do. So when Doomed Dave passed the plan from Future Karkat for transferring kids to Alternia, you agree wholeheartedly.

CG: FEFERI’S DAYMARE BUBBLE CHAIN WILL DRAG YOU TO US, YOU FUCKING POOR EXCUSE FOR A GOD.

CG: I SOMEHOW FEEL OBLIGATED TO WARN YOU, EVEN IF I KNOW THAT YOU WILL IGNORE MY WARNING ENTIRELY AND I DON’T EXACTLY KNOW WHY I EVEN BOTHER TO TELL YOU ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT, AS MY WORDS JUST BLOW THROUGH YOUR HEAD WITHOUT ANY VISIBLE REACTION WHATSOEVER.

CG: BUT BACK TO THAT WARNING SHIT, THE DAYMARE BUBBLE CHAIN IS A FUCKING PERMANENT SOLUTION.

CG: SET IN STONE.

CG: FOR SOME PARTICULARLY NASTY VALUE OF ETERNITY PROBABLY.

CG: YOUR DREAMS, HOWEVER NEGLIGIBLE THEY ARE IN THAT REALM, AND MOST OF YOUR PATHETIC SUBCONSCIOUSNESS WILL BE THERE, IN DREAMBUBBLES, SHARED FOR ALL OF US TO SEE.

CG: AND DON’T EXPECT ANY FREE PASSES. ALL YOUR PRIVATE, EMBARRASSING SHIT WILL BE OUR TO SEE AND MOCK. AND GUESS WHAT. NO-ONE IS EVER GOING TO LET IT GO.

EB: i expect it’s mutual? the dream sharing i mean.

CG: IT PAINS ME TO ADMIT BUT YES, IT IS. BUT DON’T EXPECT TO SEE ANY GROUNDBREAKING STUFF, GAMZEE’S RAINBOW-SHITTING UNICORNS COVER MOST OF THE SHARED SPACE ANYWAY.

EB: we’ll see karkat! after we’ll do the hard part, rest seems easy!

CG: YES. ALL YOU NEED NOW IS TO DIE SUCCESSFULLY.

## Karkat: Execute the transfer plan

Everyone was involved, all twelve of you, but it was Feferi who was the important one. It was she who modified the dreambubble chain, conversed with horrorterrors and her lusus and made all the preparations. The rest of you just gathered supplies and transportation, so kids would at least have the fighting chance to actually survive the transfer.

You remember your own transfer with horrid details. All twelve of you dead. No place to escape from your own dream bubble, lovingly fondled by eldritch tentacles of horrorterrors, passing through alien geometry of their beaks and mouths, only your thoughts and memories to keep you company, and all the good ones surprisingly absconded. Then Feferi came with the dream bubble chain construct, and things were marginally better, as you were still in deep shit, just not so alone anymore. And then Fef’s lusus, alive and well just like your whole universe, dragged the chain from the Furthest Ring to Alternia or something. You still don’t really understand the process, you just know that you suddenly were alive, well, right next to a tentacle monster from hell and deep, deep underwater. You’ll do quite a lot for John not to experience the same sickening drowning episode right after, or even before, finally meeting him in person.

You won’t admit it, but you are very, very excited about that last fact. As far as you can tell, all of you are.

So you wait with two submersible ships and plenty of bottled oxygen far below Fef’s hive, regarding Gl'bgolyb’s tentacles with repulsed esteem. You wait and you are prepared, and quite anxious, nervous and strangely happy to see them, to see John and Jade, and Dave and Rose too, and you wait and wait and wait...

As nothing keeps happening for quite a long time.

## Karkat: Wait some more

So you do.

And there’s still plenty of nothing happening at all.

Kids’ session is empty, entirely devoid of players as all four of them managed to achieve a Just or Heroic death. They’re offline in Trollian in the important part of that timeline, because, you know, they’re dead. You can’t contact them through dream bubbles because they aren’t part of your chain yet. They are simply not here, as you can clearly see in deep dark water between Gl'bgolyb’s tentacles.

You can’t stay there for day, none but Kanaya can, but you try anyway. Terezi convinces Gamzee to help and keeps you tightly secured as they ignore your angry rants when Vriska swims your ship to the safety of Fef’s harbour. Sollux with the other ship is there already.

Something went very, very wrong.

## Karkat: Consult daymares

In the beginning your shared dreamspace was mostly a source of deep embarrassment. After two or three perigees you got used to it in a weird, discomforting way that reminds you how Sgrub broke you all, remodelled your own minds in ways you haven’t even start to encompass.

As it pains you to admit, sharing dreams and surface memories can be helpful sometimes. For instance, it can be a real blessing when one of you is a fucking sociopath with a tendency to murderous episodes. Those episodes proved to be foreshadowed by violent dreams and visions, so when Gamzee suddenly stopped having colourful dreams of a thoroughly stoned individual and projected bloody muted rainbows of hemospectrum right from the dark carnival, you knew it was time to intervene. So you did intervene, with shooshspaps and a feelings jam, and at least no-one died this time.

After the long wait for the kids to appear in your universe, you reluctantly go to sleep. Should everything go right (and you know it didn’t), they would be here (provided they were sleeping at the moment). You don’t really expect them here, but you are not a Hero of Hope and you don’t know when all hope is lost.

There is red all around you. Not rust red like Aradia’s, but deep cherry red of your own blood. You are in a big room, more like a hall, with floor and walls smeared with plenty of red blood. The air is stale and thick with the smell of butchery, and the light plays weird tricks as you are not entirely sure what is that thing in the centre of the room. It looks disturbingly hospital-like, bringing up images of metal surgical tables, leather restraints, sharp tools and pain. Someone is standing right next to you, looking in the opposite direction.

“Hello Karkat,” he says and you recognize John’s voice, his words are tight and unsure. “It is you, right?...”

“Where are you, you stupid lost pile of musclebeast droppings,” you start talking before thinking, worried out of your mind. “Can’t you do any little thing properly, how did you even manage to screw up the simplest thing possible,” you drop quiet in the middle of the sentence, when John latches onto you like some kind of poison ivy, hugs you tighter than you are comfortable, hugs you like his life depends on it.

It’s the first time you can see him in person, not only via Trollian viewport. You also know it’s the first time he sees you at all, pesterChum not being equipped with trans-universal video feeds. He is a bit taller than you, but slimmer, more lightly built. You have the feeling that you could snap him in half if you try, which is strange for a hammerkind master. You feel the strength of his arms around you, somehow desperate and not at all cheerfully careless like you imagined your first meeting (first hug? have you ever imagined your first hug?) would be.

Your hands react autonomically - the human disease called friendship that you contracted form John sometimes robs you of your own body control - and you hug him back, your right hand on the back of his head as he sobs into your shoulder, the left in the middle of his back, and you pat him and shooshpap like he’s flipped out Gamzee, and whisper some calming words that don’t really have meaning. You can see the thing in the middle of the room over John’s shoulder, and it makes your skin crawl. There is something on it, the hospital connection even more apparent with humanoid figure strapped on top of the metal surface, bright red streaks of pain swimming around like blood in water, clouding the view.

“Karkat,“ John sobs in your shoulder, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

You can see the gleaming metal of sharp, sharp knives sticking from the figure on the table. You can feel John’s fingers twisting though your shirt on your back, and you try to disentangle him to at least get a closer look on him, on his dream, on anything that could tell you what the fuck happened, what went wrong, where had you fucked up, how to fix something, anything.

“Don’t leave me... I thought that’s you... am I dead for good... at first...” John tries to explain with broken sentences that don’t really make much sense. “Or they died... I think they did...” The shimmering, unclear thing in the middle, covered in blood and knives and that red red redness that you hate so much gets sharper, more defined, and you are positive that it’s John there, held by leather belts around his wrists and ankles, blue clothes stained with blood, incisions on his chest and face, and it is his recent memory or a dream that you are sure is grounded in reality and WHAT THE FUCK. “I am sorry I couldn’t...” John whispers into your ear and he can’t end this sentence because he’s screaming, screaming in your embrace and on the table, screaming and crumbling and diminishing and waking up and there’s more blood on the table and from his mouth and then everything stops dead.


	2. Chapter 2

## Karkat: Attempt not to freak out

You try to concentrate through the red haze surrounding you, to get rid of the awful smell of blood and pain and what you are fairly sure are human tears. The afterimage of John’s dream is frozen in that final moment before his waking up. You could go closer to the slab of metal in the middle, look at the pitiful John-shaped shadow stretched on the too large - adult troll sized - bed, but you can’t move a muscle, paralyzed by shock and fear.

The dreamscape gradually blurs and frays around the edges and you finally find the strength to run forward, to reach and grab and touch but it’s too late, the afterimage already vanishing to the point of nonexistence, and you are standing alone in the empty space, hands full of nothing. You just stare at them feeling absolutely lost.

When you are absolutely, positively sure that you’re just going to drop on your knees and be sick any second now, the dreamscape suddenly changes back to the bloody red metal table. Humanoid figurine appears just under your fingertips and you tremble because it is John and because he is cut and bruised and bloody and in pain. His wiry hands stretched above his head, wrists encircled with tight leather cuffs. You absent-mindedly catalogue signs of struggle and abuse, three malformed fingers on the right hand - broken? stepped on? - red circles around the cuffs - not deep enough to draw blood, just scratches from trying to get free - needle marks in crooks of both elbows, with bruises from broken veins. Similar cuffs around each ankle, shoes missing - human feet look very troll-like, the only difference in toe nails not orange and pointy, but pink and rounded. A big red stain on trousers - left calf injured by something sharp. Blue T-shirt cut in the middle, pale chest covered in lacerations and cuts - deep cut under the ribcage on the right side, something not clearly visible sticking inside, keeping it open. Round metal objects - sensors? electrodes? - put in seemingly random spots on the visible skin. Something around the neck - another leather bound? a metal collar? - tight, partially blocking airways. Blood trailing from the corner of the mouth - probably form a bitten tongue - and one nostril - probably from a hit - and one ear - probably... from some kind of abuse? - bloodied forehead, narrow but long mark from a knife - a scalpel? - right under right eye... Blue eyes wide open, fixed on you, and you suddenly can’t take it anymore, you try to rip the restrains to shreds, break the collar, tear those sensors (electrodes?) off, away from John’s bruised body, but you can’t, because it’s just a dream, a memory, his imagination of things that actually happened, that happen RIGHT NOW before your very eyes and you cry and scream and hold John tightly and it actually helps.

It surprises the shit out of you.

You are in your hive, the dream version of it, you know that because you make sure to change the decor slightly every time you get used to the old one enough to dream about it. This is the last perigee’s version. Also, John’s here, which is a dead giveaway.

He is pale and tired, slumped on the floor under a movie poster, but the restrains are gone and the blood is gone and you can try to pretend that everything is normal.

“What,” you try to start but your throat is too tight and you can’t properly form the question. But he knows anyway.

“I don’t know.” His voice is strained and hoarse, like he’s been screaming for a long time. “We transferred and then everything went straight to hell.”

## Past John: Land already

You breathe the air and it is glorious. Not that it smells good or is particularly fresh, it’s just the sensation of being alive again, breathing something that’s not a Medium construct makes you want to flip in the air out of pure joy.

You could try to flip in the air, but it would be ill-advised as you can’t fly anymore. You ponder that for a second.

“Dave?” you ask the space before you. “Rose? Jade?” Small movement, and then Rose stands up from the floor. “Let me contact Karkat.” You're holding one of your computers in your hand anyway, so you locate the persterChum window.

EB: karkat we did it, we actually made it happen, we are here! just like you said we would, we are...

Your message could not be delivered because you are offline. Please check your internet connection.

Rose comes closer and you notice that there’s no Dave or Jade in sight.

EB: wait a sec let me check...

Your message could not be delivered because you are offline. Please check your internet connection.

You are in some kind of corridor, metal floor and metal walls remind you of a freight train. There is also a slight movement sensation to complete the train impression. Have you not been told that your transfer destination is underwater and there will be someone waiting? You might have been trolled, though.

EB: ...somewhere...

Your message could not be delivered because you are offline. Please check your internet connection.

You stare at the pesterlog, finally reading system messages and not understanding what they say.

“We managed to cross the boundaries of two universes,” comments Rose, “we probably need a Trollian client now.” You agree, not that it makes plenty of sense, but at least it is some kind of explanation. “We are not god-tiers anymore,” Rose adds pulling her hood out of her eyes. “That might be unfortunate in the future, but it is refreshing right now. I missed walking.”

“Jade and Dave are missing” you point the obvious and Rose pulls a face at that. “And the trolls trolled us into thinking they are going to be here.”

“They might be right around the corner,” and indeed, the corridor has corners and doors and junctions and it is more like an industrial warehouse than a freight train, but the movement sensation is still present and you liked your first idea better.

“Let’s check,” you pull the nearest door just to find out it’s closed. You try some more, with same results. “Need some help here, could you See us to them? Dave and Jade I mean, the trolls can find us by themselves.”

Rose frowns and pinches her nose. Then she massages her temples and pinches her nose again. Finally, she asks, “would you kindly do the windy thing, please?”, and you try and frown and pinch your nose just like she did, and there’s nothing.

“So, we are not only no longer gods, we don’t even classify as players anymore,” you sum up and there’s nothing to be done about it, so you just shrug. “Let’s find them conventionally then, they can’t be that far.”

You try more doors and find them all closed, so you move on to the nearest junction to find out what’s there. Proportions here are weird, not entirely human. Doors are tall and wide, as if made for something larger than an average adult, and you remember that trolls have horns and some of them can be pretty elaborate and you feel a bit better about figuring it all out by yourself. If only the rest of your friends were here and not lost somewhere.

You take another turn and face three massive, twice taller than you shapes with wild hair, big (like seriously BIG!) orange horns, dressed up in black uniforms with personal symbols on the left and a pointy red logo on the right side of their chests.

“Karkat?” you ask hopefully, but deep down inside you know that’s not him. “We got a bit lost...” The first stranger says something and you can't understand anything because it's all just guttural growls and syllables rolling with clicking sound of sharp canines biting through the sentences. So trolls don’t really speak English, you think when a large hand grabs you by your arm. You wonder how in such a case you were able to communicate and decide that it has to be one of many marvellous features of Trollian, as you browse through your strife specibus to grab the Zillyhoo just in time to block another hand reaching for Rose.

And only then you realize that your hand, just like both your sylladex and strife decks, is empty and the three strangers are all bigger, stronger and nastier than you and Rose, and their decks are filled with weapons and all you can do is to go down fighting with your nails and teeth, and it won’t be a very long fight at all.


	3. Chapter 3

## Past Dave: Wake up

Seems like you missed something, because you have been strifing with Bro just a second ago and now you are standing in a dark, weird junkyard. You’re too cool to be startled, but it feels good that one of your shitty swords from that strife is still in your hand.

Then you remember the plan, the transfer and dream bubbles. Everything was ready when you kind of drifted away in your memories, suddenly more interested in those pointy shades that you spotted in a distance than in any plan involving getting back to life. Quite an ironic feat actually.

But now you are someplace else and it does not feel like a dream anymore. The room is big, illuminated by too few floor lamps with strange organic feel in them, like instead of light bulbs they are fitted with jars of fireflies or bottled faeries. Plenty of stuff lay on the floor, forming heaps of assorted junk in two neat rows on your both sides. The air smells like metal and has that dusty old not-exactly-freshness that comes from being trapped for too long in an air conditioning system.

“Dave!” you hear and then you have to sidestep to avoid being jumped on by Jade. She expects it anyway, lands expertly and turns to face you, grinning. “We made it!”

“Of course we did, the plan was flawless like a freshly groomed kitten’s fur.” You scan the room from behind your glasses, looking for the rest of you. “We misplaced John and Rose on our way here only to make the process more interesting, as otherwise it would be flat and boring in a totally uncool way. And noone can see me involved in uncool stuff.”

“Yeah sure Dave,” she runs around the room a bit, looking behind nearest junk stacks. “I’m sure they transferred with us. Maybe they landed away because they were together in the dream bubble. I left them and went looking for you and look, I’ve found you!” She jumps again in your direction and you almost smile dodging the random hug.

“We have some more missing individuals,” you remind her and yourself. “Where are the trolls? And, while we are at it, where are we actually?”

She starts one of her wide gestures that she employs in a conversation to make the visual noise, and freezes in the middle of it, in a rather uncomfortable looking position. “I don’t know,” she states breathlessly. “It is so weird!” Visual noise is back on track, as she analyzes the new sensation. “It is like I don’t know where you are, or they are, or where I am! Like I can’t reach around and mess with dimensions and locations. And I don’t think I can teleport anymore!”

You already suspected that because from the moment you woke up you have no idea what time it is now and for how long have you been here. For experimentation purposes you reach to your sylladex for turntables, not really expecting your time-travelling powers to work, and can’t find them. Actually, you can’t find anything in your sylladex, particularly because it’s empty, just like your strife deck.

Out of habit you put the shitty sword from your dream/memory in your strife portfolio, so it’s not so empty anymore.

“Jade.” You try to interrupt her stream of words. “Let’s look for something useful around.”

“Good idea!” she agrees happily. “There is plenty of weird stuff here, why is it so piled up anyway?”

You freeze at that word.

Suddenly, the broken pieces of information on troll culture you picked up from Terezi’s drawings meet in your head with memories of plenty of shitty and no so shitty movies about organized violence and have their wicked party of pattern recognition. Trolls sleep on piles, or maybe lounge on them, or whatever, piles are like beds or armchairs or sofas for horned aliens. Here you stand in a room full of piles, organized in two nice rows in quite a peculiar fashion. You are in some kind of shared bedroom, but most likely, you are in a military barrack.

Now that you know what to look for, you notice a shape in the dark, a shape half buried in a pile of junk two piles from where Jade stands, one curled horn and two gleaming eyes staring right at you from a black and white face of a murderous clown straight from a coulrophobic nightmare.

## Karkat: Try to make sense out of this shit

When John tries to explain the story, he projects memories around you both, because that’s how dreambubbles work. His memories are firm and detailed and it seems that he was very excited about the new place, absorbing all information like a sponge, prepared to be amazed and awed by the new universe and his first time seen friends. You feel like hitting your head on the wall repeatedly, just to get rid of this thought of betrayed hope.

John and Rose got transferred to some unknown place, robbed of their powers and belongings, with only clothes on their backs and items held in hands. No Dave and Jade in sight. Is must have been the first hour or two of your futile vigil under Feferi’s hive.

You stroll with John through his memory, looking closely for any hints on its actual whereabouts and looking away from parts when he is beaten into submission and captured. The location looks a bit familiar. You like having fiction and romance in your movies so documentaries were never your thing, but you share your bubble with Eridan, and when he’s not having wet dreams about just downright everyone, he’s imagining himself in his rightful place, among other seadwellers on the bridge of his own battleship, commanding the starfleet to conquer and vanquish and most of the time utterly destroy some pathetic alien civilizations. You recognize the uniforms and signs, and, more importantly, the misshapen pattern of identification plates on every door. You are quite sure that for John they were just meaningless decorations or whatever, but he remembers them clearly enough for you to make out the shape of most letters and your blood runs very, very cold when you finally decipher the markings of Battleship Condescension’s Xenobiological Specimens Warehouse One.

## Dave: Approach the Juggalo

You think about the best opening line and decide that “Hello, I’m Dave, who are you” is way below your standards, so you shorten it to one ironic “Hello” as you move closer to the troll. He observes impassively, challenging you to make your move. You skim through trolls’ names in your head. The clown one, murderous junkie, Terezi’s sometimes-hate-boyfriend. “Gamzee?” You inflect it a bit like it was question, but if that’s not him, then who?

You fail to notice that Jade is strangely quiet.

The troll is massive, his only visible horn is curled around his ear, hair braided tight behind his head, his black uniform decorated with painted skeleton, bones on the outside trailing bones on the inside, red trident intertwined with ribs. Clown skull painted on the face, large grin of makeup teeth in line with two rows of canines stretched in a wicked smile. You are way closer than you wish to, what are you doing here anyway? Like a moth into fire, you raise your hand trying to touch his chest.

You should know better than that.

He is fast but your Bro was faster, you sidestep to the back of his pile when he sidesteps to the front, strife decks flicking. His smile is even wider and more distressing, and he licks his black lips to mock you. In his hands a weapon appears, two twin yo-yos start dancing around his wrists, both painted in dull yellows and reds. All you have is your shitty sword and you are almost grateful when it breaks deflecting the yo-yo string. It is more manageable this way. You are almost sure that you can take him down, so you try and you both dance, his flying disks weaving an intricate web of wire that you evade gracefully, trying to get through his guard. You’d never thought that a yo-yo can be such a perfect defensive weapon. You almost forgot that is it also a perfect offensive weapon.

The wire cuts you above your left elbow and you are surprised because it shouldn’t be there, you haven’t seen it coming. The disk still flies around you, tying your hand to the chest and cutting through your shirt on your back, moving upwards. Bro taught you well so your other hand rises instinctively, protecting your throat and face, and that’s good because the wire encircles your neck and only your wrist prevents it from cutting through your windpipe. You can see the still flying disk from pretty up close and it has little smiley faces painted all over it. The disk finally circles around your head and hits you, hard, in the temple. Your knees give in and you are somehow on the floor, nauseated, head pounding in a very disconcerting way.

“You, ugly!” you hear from your left and your heart rises as Jade, with a large, very much alien and very, very much deadly looking rifle looks up from another pile. Various blinking lights dance on the barrel as she aims. And, happy and trusting a girl she is, her idea of warning shots not agreeing with the rest of the world, she shoots and the troll takes a bullet in his left shoulder his arm almost falls off to the floor. Violet-bluish blood - you remember the trolls calling it indigo for some reason, as indigo does not look like that at all - rushes from the wound and the troll just -snaps-.

The understanding dawns on you when he jerks his yo-yo out. You don’t think you’re going to move any of your hands any time soon from the way the wire cuts deep as you roll out of it, clashing with nearby pile. You know that the troll was just playing before, sparring with you nonchalantly, yes he wounded you but he wasn’t really paying attention. Now his blood was shed. He’s going into full murder mode and Jade is the target.

You try to stand up using the pile for support but it only scatters under your clumsy, bloody palms. Jade shakes her gun in frustration, seemingly spent her only round, moves backwards to the pile that she probably pulled the rifle from. One yo-yo - the other still kept in wounded hand, just not so active anymore - flies furiously, something clicks and the disks suddenly spurt long spikes, and the wire twists somehow and splits into secondary leads, each weaving on its own accord. Jade disappears behind the pile and it just explodes when the yo-yo strikes it in the middle, various machine parts and boxes and tubes fly in all directions and Jade backs some more but there is only wall there and all you can do is to throw yourself, with half of your shitty sword held tightly in your both hands as they are far from being reliable right now, and plunge it deeply into troll’s back.

Tip of your shitty sword catches on a rib or something and the troll shakes you off like an annoying fly and you know that you are going to get very, very killed.

The dream around you phases and you are suddenly lying on the floor in a small room. Right above you squats a troll girl in red glasses, learning on a dragon-headed white cane. Her tongue is out as she smells and tastes the air, sniffing the delicious red.

“So,” she can’t be really looking at you as you know she’s blind, but she makes a good show anyway. “Trespassing and armed robbery? Is that you, Dave?”


	4. Chapter 4

## Rose: Abscond

An omniscient cue ball once told you in an annoying white text that you don’t need artefacts like wands to channel magic. Of course, it was not exactly what it said, just what it wanted you to assume from its omissions and half-truths. But magic is a gift from the Outer Gods and it is from beyond the Medium, from beyond the two universes and you just have to believe it works on some other principle than your Seer powers and your sylladex, and what the cue ball was implying is the truth, because now it is all that you’re left with.

Three horned creatures – trolls, no doubt – were a bit surprised to see you here, and it says volumes about their civilization that the thing they default to when surprised is violence. Currently, you run. It is rather unfortunate as you don’t exactly have a place to run to, and all three of them seem to follow you quite closely. Also, John is bleeding from a cut on his leg and even if right now he might not feel it through the high of the adrenaline, he is undoubtedly going to slow down in a second or two.

So you try to concentrate while running blindly through a metal maze, feeling like your back is just an enormous target for any throwing weapon your pursuers care to equip. You try hard to summon deep voices in your head, dark power around your fingers or at least a shadowy aura around your person, all those without such trinkets like wands or charms or any other focusing equipment. You are, to your bafflement, mildly successful. When suddenly the next turn you take lead you to a short passage ending in a closed door, you are somehow prepared to unleash all that built up power on the enemies.

You are a bit concerned that there are only two of them behind you. The third one went to do something – but what? Anyway, two are still a lot for your bare hands.

You press your back to the door and raise hands, John way in front of you, disarmed but still a melee fighter, and manage to produce a needle-thin lightning from between your palms. It passes above John’s outstretched arms and strikes the first troll straight in his mouth, flaring through his pointy teeth like electricity. The air smells with ozone and burned hair, but the troll just licks his lips and spits raising a big scythe above John’s head. You try to prepare another, bigger energy outburst but suddenly a very loud noise erupts from everywhere and the light changes to pulsing, violet shade of purple alien alarm signal and you totally lose your concentration, voices fading and power withdrawing. Trolls seem to expect just this thing as they move without any interruption, the scythe in a big swipe hitting John from behind, the second troll’s staff swept low right under his knees and John is basically out of the picture when you try to calm your thoughts enough to try another spell. It is surprisingly hard now, as you keep seeing the blue of his shirt underneath their feet and can’t concentrate enough to save yourself. You vision blurs and you are surprised by hot tears on your cheeks.

But crossing John out just yet is not wise, as one of the trolls finds out the hard way when he falls down, legs entwined in blue fabric of John’s hood. You blink away those tears and almost burst out in laughter. It is the stupidest prank of all, to tie ones shoelaces, especially when one doesn’t have any, but John is the prank master and if anyone can pull this off, it is him. The troll’s staff is now in his hand and he hits the standing opponent with it just like he would with a hammer. It doesn’t really work but it helps you at least, voices back in your head singing songs of triumph and unspoken horror, and you manage to sling another force lightning towards the enemies. It hits the down one in the base of his horn, and orange turns into blue and then black, and he screams. John manoeuvres around the standing one, trying to get behind him – if he follows, you’ll get a nice shot at his exposed back, and if not, John will. Next spell hangs just on the tip of your fingers as you wait for John to remove himself from your line of fire by hiding behind the large outline of  the enemy, when suddenly he is dragged to the floor by the black horned one, wounded but still not out of commission. You release the energy in a less controlled manner than you planned, and miss narrowly. Then you are not sure what is happening, as you are still pressed against the closed door, but it’s John’s turn to cry out horribly and to go frighteningly quiet a second later. You try to commune with Outer Gods again, but the troll rises with John’s hair entwined in his fingers and he presses the blade of his scythe right to his throat, looking straight at you. As far as nonverbal communication goes, that is pretty clear. You are not sure that John is even alive, he surely looks unconscious in the way he slumps from enemy’s hand. You drop your hands, spreading fingers, palms outside to show no concealed weapons, no hidden spells. The scythe moves back and John is suddenly tossed into you, hits you shoulder first and you try to grab him and support but you can’t and you both land in a bloody mess on the floor.

And then the third troll appears with ropes and a net.

## Rose: Assess the situation

You are alive and quite well, considering. You got a shot of an unidentified substance in your arm, and it burns and makes you dizzy and uncoordinated. You are sitting on the floor of small cell, more like a cage with one metal wall that you lean on and three walls made solely of bars. You have checked the lock as scrupulously as your current state allows and it looks like a weird mixture of a digital mechanism and a grub, with no clear way of opening it. Your injuries consist only of rope abrasions, some bruising from being handled in a less than gentle way and a big hole the needle left in your arm. You can try to concentrate again but the voices now are just a faint whisper deep inside your head and you can’t understand them through the haze of the drug.

You were captured, drugged and put in this cell not long ago. You faintly remember John being here with you but now he isn’t, his blood on your clothes and the floor the only reminder of him. You don’t know what to do with yourself now.

Outside of your cell there is a larger room, too dimly lit to see the details, but you know there are more cells around you, and there is some equipment on the other side, lab-like equipment with gauges and tubes and scalpels and test-beds.

The door to the lab suddenly opens and two trolls come in. They say something but you don’t understand the words, their language consisting of sounds no human throat can pronounce. One of them – with indigo markings all over him, forming a skeleton on his uniform, rich indigo blood staining his left hand, but he doesn’t seem to mind – holds something red and white on his shoulder. His companion leads him to your cell and opens the lock and you fail to notice how exactly he achieved it. The skeleton one stands in on your doorstep, drags that red and white thing down and you shiver recognising Dave’s prone form. The troll looks at you, smiles wickedly from behind a painted skull and takes one of Dave’s hands up to his lips. The black tongue slips around your brother’s wrist, sipping his blood from a deep cut. The tip of the tongue squeezes inside the wound, the troll’s eyes never leaving yours, and Dave makes a barely audible whimper. The other troll seemingly said something that you miss, because all you can focus on is the red blood on those black lips, but the skeleton finally releases Dave’s hand and drops him on the floor right in front of you.

You wait till they are gone before crawling to Dave.


	5. Chapter 5

## Karkat: Come up with a rescue plan

John is not strictly done with getting you up to date in his current situation, but neither you nor him can take it right now. You both sit cross-legged on the floor of a weird mixture of your both dreams, your knees and foreheads touching, fingers intertwined. You keep telling yourself that you have to fix it all, find what was faulty and eradicate it, help your friends before it is too late, before...

Oh wait it already is too late, and everything wrong already happened. Also, it was all your idea, from the very beginning to the disastrous end. What a great leader you are indeed.

You have to do something, anything, fast, before you start to really comprehend how deep this shit that John and the others are all in really is. Options and ideas move lightning fast through your think pan and you discard them all because they are crappy and consisting mostly of running in circles screaming. You think John have similar thoughts, because his hands squeeze yours like he was a drowning man clinging to a lifeboat. You see the wrong shape of his broken fingers and force yourself to let go and open your palms. John doesn’t let you.

The weird mixture of spaceship’s warehouse and your hive that you are currently located in shifts. The change is not abrupt like when travelling between memories, instead it is gradual like water sipping though cracks in the dream matter. And water it is, gradually washing away remains of the space hive into the dark ocean. Waves are beautiful, white-tipped and graceful, hitting the shore with just enough force to make a quiet splash. White foam dances on the surface like a carrousel, barely recognizable shapes of hoofbeasts travel on the waves to crash on the sand of the beach and you know where you are.

You weren’t kidding when you explained to John, back then when everything was ok and before you screwed this so thoroughly, that Gamzee’s dreams cover most of the shared space. He is the most invasive and potent dreamer of you all. Psychics like Sollux or Aradia usually have a considerable influence over others’ dreams, but Gamzee is a fucking bulldozer, he leaves nothing in his wake. It must be that weird chuckle-voodoos of his, usually used by subjugglators to project fear on others, but Gamzee is too stoned to use it properly so all he does is to make himself comfortable in the dreambubble. Or two dreambubbles. Or three. Or whatever.

“Yo palebro,” you hear from behind you and in that instant you just want him to drop dead. “A motherfucker needs his share of care, I think.”

“What the shit are you doing here, it’s not that I have any surplus of time to spare so if you are going to flip or whatever you just have to forget it for a night or two because I am not exactly in the mood to pacify anyone, including your sorry murderous ass.” You are still back to him, looking at John sitting on the dark beach of Gamzee’s dream, suddenly holding a shell in his bruised hand. The clown dreamed you standing, looking at waves, so you are no longer touching John and he seems so lost. The sheer weirdness of this scene makes you dizzy. You wait for the inevitable HONK from behind, and you know that you will lose it just then.

Instead you have long arms casually wrapping around you, and a warm breath nuzzling your horns. “Was talking about you, motherfucking best friend,” Gamzee mumbles into your hair and for five long seconds you just let him hold you, feeling things inside you unwind and suddenly you can think straight now.

“Let me go you empty-brained grubfucker,” you sneak out of the hug and finally look at your moirail. “If you don’t exactly intend to go on a murder spree right this fucking second, you stay here.” The rough outline of a plan starts to formulate. You have to talk to some trolls and convince some not trolls and move fast before something – ok, SOMETHING MORE – bad happens. John right now is in a fragile state. You don’t want to leave his side, but if he moves with you, he is going to remember and re-live all that bloody shit again, and that’s definitely not something you want him to endure. Gamzee with his beach and foam hoofbeasts might be the best thing that happened to you this day actually. “Stay here and take care of him,“ you point at confused John still sitting on the sand. “Don’t move, don’t even think about anything violent and cheer him up.”

You kneel next to John. “I’m going to make it all better. Someone is going to pay and you are to be rescued now, so just keep up and wait. Don’t bleed out, don’t make sudden movements and just don’t die.” Because everything is going to be all right or you’ll end up dead right next to him. And with the dreambubble chain, you’ll be stuck here with all those cheerful memories of bleeding to death and failing your friends to keep you company forever. John makes something like a shadow of a smile and you grab Gamzee’s hand and drag him down next to the human. “Now stay” you say to both of them and move away, looking for the shortest way outside Gamzee’s influence.

“But I don’t want to take care of HIM,” you hear in the distance, “I want to take care of YOU!” The rest of Gamzee’s whine is lost when you switch dreambubbles in search for Feferi.

## Terezi: Interrogate the witness

Senator Lemonsnout stares at the witness impassively. You march around him, measuring distance in long steps.

“There was a fight” you announce to no one in particular. “There are clear signs of struggle.” Delicious cherry red is making you hungry. “The suspect is an adult troll, indigo blooded, possibly a subjugglator. Can the witness shed some light on this unpleasant situation? Why was this murder unsuccessful?”

The witness is lying on the floor, surrounded by your trusty scalemate crew. He already told you some of his previous experiences and you managed to get a clear view of the suspect, but there are still black spots in this case and you intend to have it spotless. This interrogation has to end with witness death of course, as leaving such a dangling thread in your murder case would be unprofessional.

Suddenly, you realize that you are dreaming. Ok, you expected that, it happens more or less every day. But for quite a long time, your dreams are very specific. There is no freestyle dreaming in dreambubbles, all you have here is your memories and sometimes dreams that you made up before your dreamselves died. There are no new people here, you know every one person appearing in your dreams and most people appearing in your friends’ dreams. You don’t know the Juggalo.

“Dave” you ask slowly, suddenly terrified, and your usual question sounds more intense than ever. “Is this you?”

“You already asked” your witness answers immediately. “Nothing changed, I’m still me, I’m still awesome, and you’re still graced by my presence.”

“What is happening?” you wonder if Karkat knows that Dave is here and there is red all over your floor. “The transfer actually worked?”

“Smoothly like a polished marble statue of some important dude whose name I can’t be bothered to make up. The universe was a spot on, here we are. It’s the current location that is the problem, not the transfer itself.” His usual calm demeanour is punctuated by rough breaths he takes every half sentence.

“So, where are you?” you kneel on the floor and touch him slightly on the face. His glasses are broken but still on, you trace the broken plastic with your pointy fingernail and it’s like almost half of one lens is missing, the other just chipped on the bottom. “Who did that to you?”

“Just some angry clown,“ says Dave and freezes when your hand brushes through his hair. More sticky red on your fingers. “Stop” he finally spits through clenched teeth, and you pull your hand back, getting closer with your tongue instead. “Oh no, no hair licking, you don’t know what it does to ones haircut, there is even a name for that, go away” he tries to push you away, but his left hand makes some uncoordinated move and misses you entirely. You leave his hair anyway and move to that hand, eager to check what’s wrong.

“Show me the rest” your fingers brush through deep cuts, curious about the pattern, following it along his hand, arm, loosing under his back, but finding again on the other hand. The other hand does not move to push you and you think that it is broken somewhere high, maybe upper arm or clavicle. “Why is this murder a failure?” You press your tongue to the delicious cherry red on the wrist of his broken hand and feel someone else there, other troll marking your Dave. “Who did this to you and who am I going to kill for that?”

## Karkat: Find help

You finally find Feferi on the very edge of the bubble chain, staring into darkness outside.

“Do you have a slightest, faintest idea what that fucking excuse of a horrorterror, tentacled pile of shit who can’t execute a simple plan twice of a lusus...” you follow Feferi’s gaze into the darkness before her and see something deeply disturbing there, that makes you stumble in the middle of a sentence. “...Is that her?”

She does not look like a lusus here, in the dreamspace she is a fully realized horrorterror with cyclopean tentacles, legions of eyes and teeth in weird places, eldritch mouths and beaks and it is like you are dead all over again, with an elder god up close and personal. Your eyes involuntarily try to follow one big tentacle that is closest to you and you are quickly lost in that wiggling, black mass of a living daymare dripping with black miasma.

“You were saying?” asks Fef and it makes you realize where you are, WHO you are and the spell is broken.

“I was saying” you continue, because you are Karkat fucking Vantas and if you can do something at all, it is to talk no matter what. “That grubfucking monster from the outer ring sent them...”

“To Her Imperious Condescension instead of me, yes” Feferi sounds small, no usual excitement in her voice.

“And you are fucking what, ok with that?” John is dying because someone (you), most likely that eldritch pile of crap (no, you) screwed something (your entire plan) up. “Now get her into a reverse gear and ask her to drag them from that hellhole back here.” Tentacles shift restlessly and you get a glimpse of what’s behind the enormous body of Gl'bgolyb. More green-eyed tentacles. You could live without that knowledge thank you very much. “Why did she do that anyway, can’t she tell the fucking difference between an adolescent troll and a full-blown empress of this whole shit?”

“She can hear you, you know,” Fef informs you coldly. “And yes, we discussed possibilities of a reverse transfer. Sadly, it is not possible.”

“Imagine me with my fingers in my ears shouting la la la I can’t hear you and try again,“ you don’t consider that as a possibility because that would mean a failure of epic proportions, bigger even than Gl’ub herself. “Reverse the transfer. Send them here, for fuck’s sake, send them back to their own session, any place but not there!”

“It is” Feferi’s voice is once again tiny, scared, “not possible in a current state of the situation, not possible at all.” You think you can hear the sound of your think pan breaking apart, or maybe it is the sound of you going off the deep end. “But we managed to come up with another option.”

“Does it involve the Vast Glub, because right now I might just encourage you both to.”

“Gl'bgolyb can extort some control, just to a tiny degree, over her wards” Fef explains without looking at you. She hasn’t really moved at all during this conversation. “She usually avoids it but she can.”

“You...” your mind is spinning, modifying your plans and updating them with new data. “You can get them here, physically I mean. The whole ship.”

“She thinks so” confirms Fef and you hear your own blood pumping in your ears. “That bit of control is just what it takes to order a destination change...”

“So what the fuck, don’t just stand here and do it!” you scream because if you stop and think about it for a second the world would just implode with the sheer WRONGNESS of this idea.

“Yes,” she agrees, looking down, always with her back at you. “Just what I was thinking.” Is she... crying?

“And while you’re at it, make her issue a fucking edict or something, no human experimentation whatsoever since now on or I’ll cull you all my filthy lowblood shitfuck subjects.” It could work, it can work, it is going to work!

“It does not work that way” her shoulders sink even lower. “Too complicated. Only works on simple things, stupid. Like homesickness. Or envy.”

Tentacles move more rapidly, stretching and coiling and lightly touching Fef’s outstretched hands with just tips of the most delicate ones. Somewhere deep under all that, a beak opens and makes a thin whine, like glass scratched by claws, like wool crushed by teeth, like a culled wriggler, and your ears start to bleed. You can’t even move a muscle to cover them and you feel strangely empty at the thought of your cherry-red blood being exposed. Not like anyone gives a shit right now. Not like anyone doesn’t know already. Gl'ub goes quiet or maybe you go deaf, no, it is her because those tentacles are slowing down and she just sits there again, a fucking daymare from hell.

“It's done” Feferi says quietly, and you are surprised that your hearing is intact. “She's on her way here. She also knows now that I exist and intends to cull me as fast as she can. I hope you have a plan for that.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I suddenly feel the need to assure you all that this is not, I repeat, NOT a deathfic.

## Dave: Show her the rest

You land badly, sudden pain in your hip and thigh pushing any thoughts of rolling or other ways to cushion the landing out of your brain. The troll is still smiling, baring his teeth in an unmistakable expression of a predator next to his pray. Your shitty sword is still sticking out of his back, but it does nothing to restrict or even slow down his movements. Your vision is blurry and not very accurate, and that makes you worried because it means you can’t see the wires and must focus on the disk instead. Around you an alarm erupts, purple pulsing light and a whizzing noise, and you know someone else noticed your arrival.

The yo-yo flies in your direction and you just have to move or be cut to shreds. You scramble on your hands and knees behind the nearest pile. It is not graceful but ironic enough to make you feel ok. The yo-yo comes back to the troll to be swung again and you clumsily leap towards him, into yo-yo’s blind spot, where it’s too close to handle it efficiently. Your right hand, slick with blood from wounds that you don’t feel right now, holds a metal pipe or a crowbar you pulled blindly out of the junk pile. You are the Hero of Time again, not a Knight but Merchant, buying time for Jade to do something, to find another gun, to find help, to run away as fast as she can...

The troll flicks his wrist and the yo-yo reacts to the pull of the wire and turns in flight. You grip your crowbar – no, actually it’s one of those floor lamps with a broken light piece – with both hands and, as he is too tall for you to aim for the head, hit him in the left knee. You don’t notice if you miss because your eyes do some weird tricks now, or if the troll moves with you, robbing your hit of most of its force, but the hit was feeble and unimpressive, so you change your strategy. With a sudden lift, you put your weapon in way of the wire. The yo-yo swivels on its new pivot, and thankfully the lamp does not break. The troll expertly evades the spinning disk when you rise the metal pipe higher but the yo-yo still makes its rounds, each shorter and faster, and suddenly it hits the metal and sticks there. You pull as hard as you can and your hands slip slightly on all that blood, but the yo-yo handle is suddenly free and the troll is weaponless because his other hand still can’t manage to collect enough force to throw anything. So you spin and hit him just in his bullet wound with your pipe and his own yo-yo, putting everything you have left into this hit. His flesh makes a squishy sound and indigo droplets splatter into your face and you are quite sure that should make him blind with pain.

It does not.

The troll doesn’t move back this time, does not evade or cushion your blow, he just takes it and moves forward, not even slowed down with the bone-crunching hit. His right, good hand reaches, grabs you by your shoulder and pulls down, hard. You feel something snapping, moving in a way it shouldn’t, and the pipe slips out of your hands. The troll doesn’t stop, just clenches his fist around your shoulder and arm, digging deep holes with this claws and pulling down in an angle that is just unnatural and your arm surrenders and it is you who is blinded with pain.

You drop to your knees and try to push your opponent away with your other hand, what predictably does nothing. You try to follow his movement with your body, but everything spins in your head and the smell of blood is overwhelming and there is suddenly too much pain because you passed some threshold or run out of adrenaline, and you miss a second or two. When you are aware of your surroundings again, you lay on the floor, the mangled arm in a position that makes you want to throw up. You try to move but all you can manage is a slight, useless twitch. The troll crouches above you, licking his fingers coated in red. Mister Merchant of Time, your warehouse is running empty. You really hope that Jade is far away now.

Of course she isn’t, what were you thinking. You hear another shot, and then two more, from a different gun, and the fucking invincible bullet-ridden troll glances back. He barks to you something that you feel just has to mean “don’t go anywhere” and reaches down to the floor. Your eyes double him or triple, you’re not sure as counting is too difficult right now, but you notice your metal lamp in his hand, his yo-yo still tightly woven around it, and then he drops it on your left ankle. You scream.

You miss some more seconds and the world is even more blurry and darker right now and you can’t tell what are you looking at. You think you hear Jade’s voice, angry, pained, but can’t make out the words. All you know is that you failed to protect her, failed to protect yourself and now you have to witness her being killed right in front of you, waiting for your turn. It is so ironic that you hate it with all you have left.

## Past John: Experience discomfort and pain

You wake up because someone stabs you.

It’s not the first time someone stabs you, but it’s the first time you stay alive after stabbing to properly enjoy the feeling. It is not something you wish to experience ever again. You think you scream a bit.

Your throat is rough and dry and your lips are cracked, but that doesn’t matter because someone just stabbed you. You can’t even reach and touch the wound because your hands are held above your head by some hard restrains. You also can’t roll into a ball around your stomach as your ankles are locked in a similar way. You try anyway because it is not a moment to be rational when someone just stabbed you. You think you scream some more.

Warm blood spills over your side and stomach. Someone’s hands are there, pulling or pushing, you don’t even know, doing something with the knife in you, widening the slit to put something inside. You look down to see blurry outlines of white gloved hands – now red gloved hands – and some tubes going inside of you. You don’t notice the details because your glasses are missing. A wave of nausea hits you and dry-retching makes you pause screaming, but at the same time stomach muscle movement around the stab wound makes you scream again and you thankfully black out for a second.

When you are awake again, your situation is not improved. You notice more blurry things now, white lab coats and large orange horns, your blood staining some of the white. Red-hot pain of a knife wound in your side mixed with white-cold pain of something sticking from it. Needles in both arms, one connected to a drip with something yellow, the other leading to an unseen container below you, the line red and bloody. Some equipment around you, glowing screens and organic lines. Without the glasses all you can see is colours and light, specific shapes and fine details elude you. Gleaming metal in hands of your torturers, knives? No, more like some kind of sensors that they put delicately on your chest. They are cold and only then you notice your shirt is cut right through the middle and your chest and stomach are bare and you are once more reminded of the fact that there is something pushed deep into your side and it moves slightly with your every breath and you think you scream again.

And then there are indeed knives in their hands, scratching lines between sensors and cutting your skin in an alien pattern.

## Rose: Contain the damage

You crawl to the bloody heap of limbs that is Dave. You try to put him in a more organized if not more comfortable position, but freeze when after touching one leg he opens his eyes and gasps in pain. It is weird to see him like this, glasses broken and skewed, barely holding on one ear. You don’t think he sees you as his eyes are wide and wild and there is blood there beside the usual red.

“Dave,” you start explaining and notice your voice is slurring. “Dave, it’s me, I’m just looking what’s wrong with you.” Well that is just a rough estimation of what you are trying to do, as you can clearly see that what is wrong with him – everything.

“Rse...” he breathes. “You... too...” You put a hand on his mouth, as he clearly strains himself with speaking. He tries to reach you with his left hand but it’s trapped under his body and he just shakes uselessly. His right hand, the one with cuts on the wrist, does not look like capable of reaching at all, with a collapsed clavicle and a misshapen shoulder joint.

“I need to move you,“ the words come out slow and heavy, drug in your system influencing your natural speech patterns. “You can hurt yourself more if I let you stay like that.” He closes his eyes again and you feel his jaw tense under your palm.

It is an awful and bloody work but you finally manage to lay him flat on his back, all limbs accounted for. He is gasping for air, his face even paler than usual, eyes shut tightly, blood from a bitten lip bright and fresh. You try to straighten his glasses but one lens is broken in half and the earpiece is missing anyway, so you just put them away.

You are quite sure that despite the clavicle being broken, his shoulder is just dislocated, and if you put enough force to it, it’d just pop into the socket and stop hurting so much. You don’t think you can manage that right now, with an unknown drug in your system slowing and dulling your responses you’d end up hurting him more. You should also try to set his broken leg and that should be easy enough to do even intoxicated. The break is located just above the ankle and you are thankful for small miracles, as if it was an ankle, Dave would have problems with walking even after long rehabilitation. You smile just a bit at the bold assumption that there will be an opportunity to walk ever again.

“Dave, I’m going to set your leg.” you decide to warn him. He makes a sharp intake of air and then stops breathing entirely, so you brace your own legs on the cage bars and pull in a direction that you hope is correct. All Dave’s muscles tense, his back arches from the ground and he wails, the first sound he makes after you silenced him in the beginning, but you feel something click under your hands and the leg looks better. Dave looks worse.

But all this is just superficial – you smile a bitter smile again, broken bones and cut tendons superficial. What makes you really worried is blood in his hair, blood in his eyes and the fact that his pupils are wide and uneven and don’t really react when you put on or remove his glasses. He has a serious head wound, and that’s not something you know how to treat in this conditions. You just remember from some movies that you shouldn’t fall asleep with a head wound, and Dave just drifts in and out of consciousness.

You wrap various wire cuts with straps torn of your hood when the door opens again. Some kind of hospital bed is being rolled in, three trolls in lab coats install it in the middle of the lab, hooking all kinds of equipment to someone on this bed and you are breathless with worry as you are one hundred percent sure that has to be one of your missing friends.

You recognise an IV line dripping something yellow, and another apparently collecting blood, filled with human red. Three lab technicians move with practiced confidence around their newest specimen, noting down measurements and drawing plots. They communicate with monosyllables, evidently it’s something they do often. One of them moves in with a knife in his hand…

You recognise John’s voice in the awful scream that follows.

Your hand moves unconsciously to Dave and clamps on his good shoulder, squeezing tight. His eyes are open again as he tries to see what’s going on, but can’t move his head just the right way. He reaches with his hand instead, misses, tries again and finally you are holding hands listening to John’s screams.


	7. Chapter 7

## Karkat: Be the leader

Dream bubbles are tricky places, full of unwanted memories and embarrassing thoughts, so you consider waking yourself and everyone else up and opening a memo or doing a proper meeting, but eventually you end up gathering your experts in your sleep anyway. After an enormous effort of not strangling them all for being obnoxious dumbasses who can’t read your mind and understand how grave the situation is from your unstoppable tangential monologue, you gather all the trolls who might have some useful insight on the matter in one spot.

“So, there’s a flagship incoming,” starts Vriska, looking like she owns this place. Well she does, it is her dream that you are meeting up in, the wheelhouse of an old pirate ship or some other weird crap. You are not sure why are you here exactly because you were aiming for Eridan’s bubble of a genocidal douchebag powermaniac with a star fleet, but Vriska said something or did something else and you are suddenly here. “Exciting.”

“We are simply all going to die,” states Eridan matter-of-factly. You got him here as an expert in starships and you already hate your past self for such a stupid idea. “The best course of action right now would be imprisoning you Karkat and maybe Fef and giving up to them as a token of good faith. Then some of us might be spared. Some, I say.”

“Could you all pathetic assholes just shut up and listen to me for a minute and not undermine my authority before I even reveal my plan, which is, I admit, rather sketchy now, but that doesn’t mean that you can spread your defeatist bullshit now or actually ever at all. I am still your leader who might have some days of me being the worst leader in the whole history of crappy leadership but that does not justify giving up now before we even started doing something remotely useful in our current situation.” You break to take a breath and look at your experts. Your navy specialist Eridan is being defeatist but who cares. Your weird bullshit guru Vriska is excited. Feferi, the only one who knows what really goes on, is depressed. Sollux, your technology consultant, looks bored. Tavros, who just kind of wandered into your meeting, looks confused. The rest of your team is busy, MIA or not really bringing anything new to this ensemble and just simply absent. “Yes we have a situation here, a fucking serious situation of an incoming flagship of Her Imperious All Seriousness No Bullshit Cullbitch Condescension, and that is good because she brings Egbert and the others with her as the Her Tentacled Shitpile From The Deep missed the right transfer spot by just one tiny fucking galaxy and sent them all right into waiting claws of who is I’m sure her most favourite ward. The ward in question being the Empress, for those who need to take notes to understand even the simplest things that I say. And Fef stop looking so miserable it’s not your fault your leader is an utter moron who let that all happened.”

Each of your team of experts reacts differently. Feferi is even smaller than a minute ago, curled into a tiny ball on one of the rope coils that litter Vriska’s ship. Eridan grits his teeth and has the unmistakable look of someone who is going to shout “I warned you, I told you how doomed we are!” in a second or two. Tavros look scared but sharp, ready to follow your orders. Sollux on the other hand is clearly considering options, wheels in his head moving. Vriska... Vriska looks at you totally stunned.

“They what? John what?” she asks when you make another pause for breath. You briefly consider pointing her in the general direction of Gamzee’s dream, but think better of it. She would make him explain, show, relive, and you truly hope he is very busy right now riding carousels or juggling balls or even lying on a horn pile in the middle of a feelings jam with the stoned clown. You suddenly feel uneasy with that last thought.

“John is currently extremely not well and we are to do something about it fast,” you explain instead. “That’s the fucking reason why we have a flagship incoming, to break into and to liberate the subjects of bloody experiments before they fucking expire.” You are definitely not ok with that, neither is Vriska. Human disease called friendship all the way. “The Eldritch Waste of Space the Unpronounceable got The Empress to get her grubsucking ass here. Estimated time of shit hitting the fan, one perigee. When she is here, we are going to get to the ship, invade it and get our friends out, preferably not getting too many of us culled in the process. Any questions?”

Yes, there are questions and yes, there is valuable insight and yes, there is plenty of useless and time wasting bullshit and yes, your plan is lacking failsafes and running on wishful thinking but it is the best plan possible in this situation and you have the Thief of Light on your side, personally interested in this plan to come to fulfilment. Help is coming.

## Rose: Observe

You don’t remember the moment when John stopped screaming, it must have been a gradual thing when his abused voice gave up. All you can hear now are rare moans and whimpers and you are sickly grateful for them because it is the only way to know that John is still alive. He must be unconscious now, because he is limp and does not move even when one of the lab-trolls stitches the wound in his side with a large and ugly tool. Your drugged brain makes the connection a bit late, but finally you are sure – they’ve finished their work at this moment, and right now they are fixing their specimen so it wouldn’t die before the next stage. The fact that you just named your closest friend “a specimen” makes you want to jab your needles in your eyes. How unfortunate that you don’t have any needles lying around.

Dave is not exactly here too. His closed eyes move fast like he’s dreaming. You touch his face and it’s hot and clammy, a painful shiver travels across his body every few seconds. You wonder what those lab technicians would do if you asked for some water, and then remember you don’t speak their language.

Speaking of which, the lab technicians are finishing their bloody work, detaching John from all the equipment and finally one of them grabs his bound wrists and drags him from the operating table to the floor and then to the cages. You cringe seeing his bloodied, prone form dragged to a cage next to yours. He is not going to your cage. He is going to lay there, motionless, just beyond the reach of your arm, with no one to help and no one to check his wounds and you grab the bars and shout his name trying to reach him or the troll you don’t even know, you just know you can’t be silent and still when he is so close but so distant, and you are desperate to do even a tiny amount of something, and the dark voices finally break through the drugged haze in your mind.

Your frantic screaming switch to eldritch gibberish for a few words, black mist tears from your outstretched hand, the lab is suddenly getting cold and all you can see is white. You grind your teeth to remind yourself where exactly you are and what you are trying to accomplish and gather all that loose power into one needle-thin ray of destruction and run it firmly through the left eye of the troll hauling John. He instantly collapses.

The alarm signal is faintly heard through singing from beyond all universes filling your head. You concentrate again, looking for another troll to fry, and find him hidden flat behind John. You hesitate and he takes the opportunity to seize his prisoner by the throat and stand up, dragging John with him as a human shield. You follow John with your powered-up hands and see him opening his eyes slowly, and then starting to panic, clawing with handcuffed hands on troll’s arm on his throat, trying to kick or headbutt his captor, and totally ruining your chances of a clear shot. The voices tell you to try anyway, even when the lab technician hits John under his ribs, right into the ugly, black and red stitch to subdue him, and puts a knife next to his stomach to subdue you. The voices sing and shout and order you to burn this place to the ground, to freeze them all, to push a lightning right through John’s abdomen to get to the troll behind him. John mouths something to you, maybe says it out loud but the voices are screaming right now, so you have to stick to lip reading, “help,” you read, “is,” he continues, “coming”, and you lower your hands and let some white clad, yellow eyed troll who mysteriously appeared next to your cage stick another shot of psychoactive drug into your arm. The voices retract and you are alone in your head again.

Your cage bars are covered with a thin layer of ice. You finally remember that you were not alone here, and find Dave under the furthest wall, frost in his hair, on his face and hands, curled into a ball, blood frozen on makeshift bandages, all your handiwork on getting him sort of patched-up destroyed. He looks in your direction with those bloodshot, unfocused eyes and whispers, “welcome back”.

## John: Be dragged to the reality

You are on the dark beach, with Gamzee showing you how to ride on foam unicorns, what is unusual but nice. The troll is clearly not happy to be left here with you, but tries his best to do what Karkat asked and to cheer you up. The moment you are on the furthest from the shore point of the wide circle the wave-carousel makes, you suddenly can’t breathe, air around you freezes, your skin tingles with static electricity and everything, everything hurts. You wake up.

The room is big and dark. You recognise it from before, when you were on the table, but now the perspective changed and you are looking at a row of big rectangular cages bolted to the back wall. One of them is occupied by a mass of dark, cold tendrils that you regretfully identify as Rose. The air is cold, very cold, the source of it is black fog emanating from Rose’s body.

All those information you gather unconsciously, because your consciousness is very busy screaming that you are suffocating. You struggle uselessly until someone hits you in your stomach and you are sure that hit eviscerates you, the cold knife kept there a total overkill. At least the pressure on your throat recedes and you gulp air in painful, short gasps.

After what feels like years you manage to pull yourself together to understand the situation a bit better. Rose-shaped darkness before you aims in your direction with her steaming hands surrounded by white lightning. Someone keeps you firmly between her and himself, arm on your throat, knife on your belly. You try to tell Rose that you’ve seen Karkat and he organizes a rescue operation, but regret it instantly as she surrenders, probably worried about your well-being, then something unclear that your glassless eyes can’t identify happens, and then black tendrils, dark fog and cold all gradually vanish.

Your captor throws you into the cage next to Rose’s and you land on the floor and curl around your stab wound finally. The world spins in a disconcerting way that is a sure sign of significant blood loss. You think about blacking out, Gamzee surely waits with this dream carnival, but you have to speak with Rose. You look for her but can’t see her, she must be in the back of her cage where you can’t see from the floor. You don’t feel like sitting up yet, so speaking has to wait. Actually, you don’t feel like sitting up this week. Or this year.

You almost miss the moment when the laboratory is suddenly flooded with guards with blue, teal and green symbols on black uniforms. They secure the place, aiming various weapons at you and lab technicians. There was a security breach of some sorts… ah yes, Rose. The guards – they probably have some fancy troll name, like threshecutioners or something – are now poking a body on the lab floor. Some dead troll there, half of his head missing. The guards seem to just laugh at his misfortune. Lab technicians are getting debriefed, body removed after fun have been had, and finally the alarm that you didn’t even notice stops screaming. You are surprised that no one came to you to question or torture or kill, but the guards don’t seem to give a flying fuck about lab staff elimination process. Trolls are weird like that. They vanish just like they appeared and you think the lab is closed for today.

But not really, because the door opens again and two people come in – a troll in a weirdly decorated uniform, with a painted face, and another figure, human-sized, and basing on the colour combination you are sure it is Jade. She walks beside him on her own accord, guided by a smear of black reaching her neck – a leash? The troll stops for a second, consulting a just-leaving technician, and then leads Jade to your cage. She is quiet but you can hear a sharp breath when she sees you curled on the floor, and probably Rose in the next cage. The cage opens and she is pushed inside, leash detached. She drops on her knees right next to you.

Her face is bruised, tight and angry, and that’s weird to see because that is Jade and Jade is not often silently angry. You are so happy that she’s alive and in one piece that you manage to sit up. Jade hugs you tightly and it hurts but you don’t say anything because you both need it desperately, instead you try to hug her back with your cuffed hands, which is not a trivial logistic project. You feel her crying in your shoulder and you whisper in her ear “help is coming”. But help is not coming this minute, and the troll comes to the other cage, opens it and pushes Rose aside. He’s a bit too big to fit inside, but he has enough arm reach to grab something and pull out and all you can do is simply stare at half-conscious Dave hauled outside. He makes a soft noise and Jade lets you go, slipping out of your bound hands, and grabs cage bars.

## Rose: Observe some more

Things happen. They are important and you should pay attention, but you can’t, too focused on foggy insides of your head. There were some trolls around a few seconds ago, but they are gone now, that unfortunate individual that you half-burned with your finger-laser gone too. You are not sure if you should count this outburst as a failure or a success, as you accomplished precisely jack shit, hurt Dave and got drugged again, but at least one of them is dead. One troll at a time and you will break free eventually. This sounds so funny that you chuckle a bit.

Someone new is there, another troll, the one from before, when did he get here. You drift to the front bars of your cage to see more, and notice Jade thrown into John’s cage. Good, you remember John being alone right now was a thing, it’s good it is not a thing anymore. The troll is still around, heading in your direction actually, and you once more try to notice what exactly needs to be done to open that stupid lock, and once again you are too high to understand. You let him shove you to the side, because you are too fascinated with the concept of opening doors. You barely notice when he drags your brother outside, looking at him but not understanding what’s going on. You decide to file your current memories for further processing.

“Dave!” shouts Jade and his eyes flutter open. “Let him be, you monster, haven’t you done enough already you stupid horned freak?” Dave’s eyes are unguarded by his sunglasses and you wonder if that’s the first time you see him without them, and then you remind yourself that indeed, you’ve seen him like that since he was dragged here a few hours ago. It doesn’t matter right now. There is redness there, way more than it should be, and he clearly has problems with locating Jade. You wonder again if he can see at all. “Bad troll!”

“You’re alive.” His voice sounds as almost usual, raspy and quiet, but the strange, breathless quality is new, and the joy of Jade not being dead is not masked under some coolkid metaphor. The troll ignores this little conversation and drops Dave on the floor right next to the other cage. Jade reaches to him and stops right before touching, clearly scared of what she sees. “What had happened after I lost?”

The trolls says something in the alien language and flicks a weapon from his strife deck. You are mildly curious if he is going to kill Dave right here, and what should you do with it, but no, he flings his weapon into the cage and both Jade and John make a surprised yelp. Dave shouts “what the fuck” and pulls himself into a sitting position.

You look into the other cage and see a piece of wire around Jade’s neck, right on that new indigo collar she wears. John tries to untangle it, but his hands shake and the troll shows his lack of approval by jerking his end of the wire. Both John and Jade freeze.

“Need some subtitles here, if anyone is still alive could you turn on a voiceover? Harley? Egbert?”

“We’re alive” says Jade warily. “We’re... well, more like I am being threatened. Is your sight one of the things that are currently wrong with you?” The troll says something more and jerks the wire again, and Jade stops. Then she tries again. “I think he wants you to get closer”.

“Fuck, what? Or, more importantly, fuck, how?” You can see knuckles of Dave’s left hand white on cage bars. He tries to pull himself straight but just manages to hurt his dislocated shoulder. You wonder why haven’t you made him a makeshift brace, just tying his hand to the torso would do, but that’s a bit too late now. “Ok, that threatening bit, how serious it is in ten points scale?”

Jade starts to answer but the troll jerks the wire again and this time he means it. Jade screams again, but this time pain is apparent in her voice, not only fear and surprise. You can see the wire slipping from the collar and cutting through her neck.

You haven’t even noticed how Dave managed to stand up, propping on his good leg and cage bars, face white. “You are so dead that all good troll newspapers already printed your eulogies, and all of those were either insincere or happy that you’re gone.” He pushes himself from the cage in the direction of the troll, takes exactly one step and falls to his knees. Breaks the fall with a good hand and continues moving forward, turning the fall into a roll on a good shoulder, dragging the broken leg behind. Next step is clumsy, because his weight is on the wrong hand now and he bites a moan trying to switch hands, but finally gets enough momentum for another left-shoulder roll and lands right next to a knee of the troll. Who smiles so bright that it makes you sick.

“I’m ok” you hear Jade, not really sounding ok. For a few seconds the only sound in the lab is Dave’s pained, fast breath, and then his body finally gives up and collapse face-first into trolls feet. With a flicker of the wrist, troll unwinds the wire from Jade’s neck – you can now see it’s attached to a flying disk, a yo-yo – and puts it away into his specibus. He crouches over Dave, dragging his nails through the cuts on the back of his shirt. Then he grabs his head and Dave jerks back, protecting the wound, but the troll grip is firm, cruel and unyielding. With a bit of manoeuvring he manages to clamp something around Dave’s neck – an indigo collar, similar to the one on Jade. Dave’s hand instantly goes up and starts to tug at it.

The troll, seemingly content with the situation, stands up and lifts Dave by his broken shoulder, making a conscious effort to put his claws right into the holes he did earlier, and drags him back to your cage.


	8. Chapter 8

## Lab technician: survive the incident

You are kind of excited about the prospect of your new research. Few hours ago four stowaways were located and captured on board. They belong to an unknown alien species, clearly inferior to the troll race, but very interesting nonetheless. How did they manage to slip on board and avoid detection for who knows how long is a question for threshecutioners, and you are sure many of them will be culled for this incident - if not for criminal neglection, then for being in a wrong place, wrong time. You decide that they totally deserve it, those self-centred, obnoxious bastards.

As for your new specimens, there are four of them captured and caged, but only two are available for research purposes. They are seemingly from two different hue-castes. Unfortunately, the obligatory checklist of tests to run on every new alien race usually takes eight to ten subjects to complete so you don’t know yet how will you fill up your research quota, especially when one of the highbloods claimed the pair he found in the subjugglators quarters as his possession. The creepy fucker says something about newest playthings and right now goes around the ship with one of them leashed to his belt for unknown but probably sick reasons. You think he should be culled for the incident as well, as the aliens were found in the subjugglators quarters when he was lounging there, clearly his fault. But he’s a highblood and a subjugglator, so everyone just looks the other way.

The two subjects unclaimed by sick psychos belong to two different castes. You are not sure how many castes are in their society, so you just stick to labelling them “high” and “low” right now. The female is clearly a low, with strong psychic powers currently kept in check by an industrial sopor solution injection. The male is a high, so you began your experiments with him, expecting him to be stronger and to survive longer. You were really freaked out when you saw his blood, bright red like nothing that should be in anyone’s veins. The other caste’s blood is also red as you’ve seen on the male claimed by the highblood. Those aliens are really, really weird, you wonder how they can even pull out a society of any sort. Anyway, you collected red samples, more than it was necessary, to show off and shock your quadrants.

There was another incident just half an hour ago, when one of the scientists fucked up a simple task of paying attention and the low-caste female got sober enough to start psionicking. It might even be you who fucked it up, too busy with experiments, but in your report it would be your colleague’s fault, the one who died of a brainsplosion, if anyone is interested in any report at all. You were behind the unlucky dead guy when the alien attacked, and you managed to grab the other subject as a hostage.

You were a bit too excited at first and almost strangled the male by accident. You noticed it only because he woke up suddenly and started being difficult, so you punched him in the fresh probe scar as a suggestion of calming down. The knife next to his ribs also helped. You starting to think about carefully absconding, leaving yellowblooded support staff to deal with the unruly prisoner, but your hostage said something, probably ordering his subordinate to surrender, and she did.

All in all, it wasn’t such a bad incident. One ceruleanblood down, the threshecutioner squad in good moods as some blood was spilled, your subjects unharmed, more importantly, you unharmed. You are back from a not very detailed debriefing to check on your specimens. When you were leaving the lab, you went pass the indigo psycho and his new toy on their way inside, and you would not be happy if he fucked up the other two for some reason. Thankfully, he is no longer inside. All four prisoners are huddled close to each other, as close as cage bars allow, tending wounds and exchanging hushed words. You leave them be and go check your research results.

When everything is in order, you keep the pair of glasses you took from the high male – you are this close to naming him “subject A” or something. Your staff have taken measurements of the glasses so you know the subject A is nearsighted. You prepare two trays of protein bars and bottled water for the prisoners and place the glasses on the one for high-caste cage, and then watch with amusement as they fall silent when you push the trays through feeding slit in cages. Funny aliens. On your way to the door, you tick the “random act of kindness” position on the test checklist.

## Terezi: be the teacher

Your favourite coolkid is no longer around, and here it surely means that he woke up. You briefly hope that he has a suitable protection from the light of day, but then you realize that if adult trolls are around, daylight is the least of anyone’s worries. You hug your scalemate in frustration, picking at the unstitching button eye. Remnants of Dave’s recall session litter your dreamscape, dark, unclear piles of stuff, cage bars, red blood. You don’t know plenty of things, like where is he or why is he there, so you do the only thing available to you in this situation. You investigate.

You try to recall the impression of the adult Juggalo. Dave is quite observant so it’s a bit easier than with most of your other friends, but still the image is murky and vague. All but the most pervasive smells are missing and the taste map is one big blank spot with “here be dragons” written all over it, but the sounds are very clear and there are even a few touch inputs. Some facts are unmistakable, the suspect is an indigo blooded adult troll in an indigo-black uniform with a painted face, wielding twin yo-yos. More details are hard to pin down. You can’t locate his sign, Dave must have missed it or take it as a part of fancy ornaments on the troll’s clothes. You can do an educated guess that he is a subjugglator but can’t really find his rank insignia. Also, you are not even sure you’d recognise him while meeting face to face.

You almost decide to run looking for Karkat for explanation and help, when the dreamscape shifts and makes room for another presence.

“Honey I’m home, I hope you missed me,” he is trying to be nonchalant, his voice very, very measured and controlled. He smells even more contrasting than before, red blood sweeter, white skin paler. “Have I missed something important?”

“Not really,” you move to his side. This time he is sitting with one knee to his chest, the other leg flat on the floor, head bowed, left hand cradling his neck. “Have I?”

“How are your teaching skills? Are you prepared to be the awesome teal Yoda to the best Luke ever? You can call me grasshopper and I’ll do every wax-on, wax-off you require with style.” His breathing is shallow but less laborious than before, like he’s getting used to the pain.

“Why would we do such things?” you kneel right next to him. Your fingers brush his face and you are astonished to find the sunglasses missing.

“That’s customary in human teacher-student relationships,” you feel his muscles tense and then relax, like he decided not to move away from your touch. You seize the opportunity and move in with your tongue, tracing his cheekbones and moving up. Crumbled blood is red and metallic, a bit darker than fresh and you find it fascinating because coagulated troll blood does not change the colour. His face is icy cold, but there is feverish fire burning deep inside. White skin is deeply shadowed just under his wide open eyes, eyelids unmoving, even when you can’t contain your excitement and just lick his eyeball without any considerations. It’s sweet and exciting just like you imagined, but has some unpleasant aftertaste like some bloody dead thing. Dave suddenly angles his head, not to evade your tongue but to press his own to your cheek and your legs fail you and you fall on your ass startled. “What, have I done something wrong?”

“That was just so weird and unexpected!” you shout at him, angry at yourself for ruining a perfect moment. It is too late to go back, you smell him moving away again. “What’s wrong, what do you need me to teach you?” You think you already know because there are not too many things that you’re good at and he is missing his glasses and lets you taste his eyes, but you really want him to say that.

“The patented smell-o-vision and all that licking business. I can even pay for licence if that’s required, mind you my boondollar account is currently locked in another universe but as soon as I... get a local one...” he suspends his voice like he’s listening to something. “Funny feeling. I think someone is trying to wake me up. I’m busy, please leave your message after beep. Anyway,” he shrugs just a little with only one hand, “my ironic metaphor lost irrecoverably, I need to taste the cherry-red just like you. Other colours too if that’s not a problem. Right now it could be quite crucial to our survival.”


	9. Chapter 9

## Jade: Control the dream

Lucid dreaming have been bread and butter for you for as long as you remember. Your experience with dream selves is tremendous. You were first to wake up on Prospit, with prophetic clouds of Skaia guiding you through the childhood and then the game. You are also well versed in the dream bubble business being the first player whose dream self died. You are perfectly capable of recognising if you are awake, dreaming or dead. It does not help at all.

Long-nailed, brutal hands grip you tightly, pushing to the rough surface. Your clothes are torn, the hands bound high above with a wire cutting into the wrists. Legs hopelessly entangled in his and your own skirt. His teeth somewhere on your neck, drawing blood, breath surprisingly cold.

You fight it because you know you are in a dream bubble and it is just a vision based on your memory, but it was not that way, not that way at all! It is just something your subconscious mind, who clearly hates you right now with the feeling totally mutual, decided to visualise basing on your recent experiences. Which, you insist, were not that way at all!

You manage to detach yourself, split your dream into two parts, one with you staring into the black abyss of the Furthest Ring, and the other, carefully placed behind your back, with your memory image resembling videos from the sites you had to lie about your age to visit. But it was not that way at all!

You still fight to control your subconsciousness, kicking all inappropriate associations out of its tiny little animal brain. You finally succeed. The accursed barrack unfolds around you, Dave engaged in a fight with an enemy too big, too nasty and too competent to approach without a high level weapon and all you both have is just some junk and your game-honed skills.

The image plays the scene faithfully at last. You locate a rifle in the junkyard around you, delighted to see it operational and loaded with one bullet. All that training with Eridan’s weapon at least left you with an understanding of trolls ranged weapon technology. Trolls in general believe that safeties are for sissies, so the rifle just wakes up to life under your touch, no fiddling required. So you try to make that bullet count, putting it in the current enemy’s fighting hand right after Dave has fallen on the floor stunned.

It does not work as you intended. The big, indigo-splattered troll starts moving in your direction with the inevitability of a freight train in a tunnel and you are suddenly out of bullets and options.

Dave surges forward, plants his broken sword in the troll’s back and gets tossed away, but the troll’s attention is again fixed on him, and you can scramble trough assorted junk around you searching for more weapons. Where was one, there could be many more, and indeed you find not one but two, a pistol and another rifle. Your Grandpa would be proud because the rifle is actually bigger than you.

You fiddle with both guns for a few seconds, check ammo levels – low, check autofire switch – present, check crosshair – no such thing you silly goose, and almost drop the pistol when Dave suddenly screams. Instead of the current situation, you suddenly see a moment in the past, another fight, a teleporting enemy, and a mist of red from a bullet-ridden body. You blink to get rid of this picture and to concentrate on the present and take a shot, discard the rifle and aim with a pistol, dual tapping the troll right through his chest.

He stays unimpressed.

Dave is on the floor behind him, you can see his faint outline in the shadows. The troll gives you a look and gets back to Dave, hitting him hard with a metal bar. You suddenly realize that you are moving forward, the spent gun still in your hand, what are you going to do, pistol-whip your enemy? Well you have to do something, you can’t just stand there watching him killing your closest friend. You just hope that some kind of a battle plan will suddenly emerge when you close the distance.

Of course, it does not.

So you just go with the flow and indeed pistol-whip the troll, shouting and screaming something about him being a bad dog, no cookie. Somewhere deep inside you feel deeply embarrassed with yourself flying of the handle like that, it is probably a kind of mental breakdown that Rose would thoroughly diagnose and give it a name like some-dead-German-complex or Eastern-European-sounding-surname-disorder. Outside, you keep hitting the troll’s chest, his highest point you can actually reach, with a pistol held in your hand like it was a newspaper and he was just a big, stupid animal who needed guidance and a steady hand.

Maybe he is just like that, because instead of tearing you apart he just lets you hit him, smiling even more creepy than before. You slow down and eventually stop, breathing heavily, waiting for his move. And he moves, steps back half a step, next to Dave again and you finally catch a glimpse of him, unconscious or dead, blood pooling around his head, limbs twisted in sickeningly wrong way. The troll says something short and ugly and kicks Dave right in the solar plexus, and he wakes up with a strangled cry utterly devoid of air, arching away from the kick. You raise your pistol again and the troll just calmly removes it with two clawed fingers, flinging it away into dimly lit shadows around you. You hit him with your fist instead, and this works just as well.

Quite quickly you achieve some kind of agreement. You hit him and shout at him and treat him like a bad dog, and he does not harm Dave more. You don’t understand it, except that you do, and it sickens you. You are tired and emotionally exhausted and all you really want to do is to curl in a ball and cry.

# Days in the future, but not many

## Karkat: Lead the rescue attempt

Contrary to a popular belief, Alternia has quite a few space-capable vessels, most of which are currently in a state of ruin because of sweeps of neglect and misuse. Conscription fleets tend to destroy any ship they find, but resourceful kids always manage to hide or disguise their favourite toys. How exactly your pirate queen got her hands on one of those in such a short notice is a mystery, but it definitely involves someone getting all the luck, all of it. If the current state of its bridge is any indicator, it’s former rustblooded owner won’t be needing it any time soon, too preoccupied with having most of his blood outside of his system. Of course, it is totally possible that he is currently food for a certain spider lusus, but you choose not to dwell on that subject loo long.

Anyway, you are not on that ship right now. Your meticulously put together, threefold rescue plan is very much a thing in progress and your small, close-range and antiquated but still capable of space flight ship is currently on the other side of the big, angry red stain on the black of outer space that is Battleship Condescension. Vriska is in charge of the decoy mission of provoking a fire exchange with the battleship. You keep telling yourself that she is the right person in the right place – your other space mission rely on stealth and your third mission is entirely ground-based, and Vriska is not known for her stealth capabilities and not flying at all was simply out of the question – but even so you are completely sure that she is going to kill herself and her strike team in the most flashy way possible. After that, the stealth team is going to be discovered and promptly executed, and then the home team will be taken down as well. That’s all you really have to say about your own brilliant and foolproof plan.

The battleship in front of you turns very slowly as you move away from the distraction team with some space junk Sollux swept together to mask up your existence. You are the stealth team, four of you crammed on the board of a very small, very crowded lifeboat you luckily found on the decoy ship. The lifeboat consists of a bridge – more like a cupboard with a wide display window and a control desk, and two very small respiteblocks called cabins for only gog knows why. Instead of recuperacoons, they are fitted with metal berths called bunks (also for gog knows why). You don’t really care about the terminology because you are going to spend here only a couple of hours, waiting for your perfect moment to go in disguised as another piece of space debris.

Terezi kneels on the control desk, her feet messing with a very important and not really working properly anyway equipment, hands and tongue pressed to the window in a state of total awe. It was to be expected, the battleship being red and all, but you don’t share that sentiment in a slightest. Black, starry space around you looks disturbingly similar to the Veil, and the three-pronged ship looks like a symbol of a centuries-long oppression. Maybe because it is a symbol of a centuries-long oppression. You keep telling her to go the fuck down or sit the fuck up or at least stay the fuck still but she predictably ignores you and keeps fussing around with the glass and controls.

You wait and wait and wait, thinking you’ll go clinically insane in a few seconds. The plan is not only fuelled by wishful thinking, it is also based on the intelligence that you personally can’t confirm. It’s just another thing from The Game, the most infuriatingly annoying thing ever, that your brain decided to develop a stress-induced insomnia. It was helpful in the Veil but now it cuts you away from the best source of information and from your hurt friend. You have to rely on others, Terezi reporting on Dave, Gamzee claiming to still taking care of John with Vriska backing him up, Kanaya feeding you half-sentences about Rose and Feferi being frighteningly secretive about Jade. You tried to triple the sopor dose, even considered eating the baked shit, but chemically-aided sleep rendered you braindead for a day, incapable of understanding the images around you, not to mention any serious dreamcrafting necessary to navigate through the dreambubble. So you dedicated all your unspent dreaming energy to this suicidal plan and here you are, waiting for Vriska to engage the battleship in a sorry excuse for a space vessel.

The red ship turns a bit more and you can finally see small shapes detaching from the main hull, heading towards the planet. The interceptors for Feferi, intended to find and cull the Heir. They are not going to find her there, as she is manning the weapons onboard of the decoy ship, backed by Kanaya and Tavros. However, they are going to find Eridan down there, left to care about Fef’s hive.

You wonder how is he going play it. When you left he was screaming things about surrendering, but the old troll’s territorial instinct can just kick in. Just in case, Equius, Nepeta and Aradia are going to back him up in the fighting department or just abscond in the case of disaster.

You suddenly spot red ship’s huge weapon bays taking aim to that particular part of space where the decoy should be. All the luck, please, they are going to need plenty of it, Vriska, do your thing successfully or I’ll kill you if you die... And then your whole boat jerks under sudden red and blue psionic discharges and surges forward.

## Sollux: Be the hero

Everyone is so fucking preoccupied with the other ship that they don’t even notice you slipping away to one of the two cabins on the back of the small ship. It is time for you to prepare for that crazy scary part of KK’s plan that you can’t believe you actually agreed on.

You lay on a bunk, bracing yourself on metal rails in case something goes wrong. Futile gesture. In case something goes wrong you should be doing it outside, preferably in the void of outer space, away from anyone you care about. Of course it would also be totally pointless, so you just have to believe nothing goes wrong and you are as awesome as Strider only thinks he is.

You bind your head with a purple blindfold, actually FF’s scarf or some other piece of a flippant garment you managed to snatch the night before. You went blind once and it was so quiet and peaceful, the best time in The Game you actually had. Then a whole bunch of shenanigans made you whole once again, fully alive without any weird quantum half-states your bifurcated selves were so used to. Also, complete with both eyes and all the teeth and the voices in your head. So now you tie your eyes tightly, not for it to actually do something in case you flip off, but to remind you of yourself, where you are and what exactly you are trying to do.

You miss AA so much, she should be here with you right now because if there was ever any time you needed a moirail it was now. She should be here, calming you and helping you to focus up, holding your hands and keeping your eyes closed. Instead you are left with the image of her you’ve seen right after your last episode, in the ruins of her hive, dead and burned. You almost freak out and push this thought away with the memory of the moment when you stated the ultimatum, either you or her on the ship, if Karkat wanted you to fly and do your job, he had to find Aradia something to do planetside. And he did, and you are here alone.

Not really alone, of course. KK pretends he is steering, hands on the yoke and all. You let him, because there is no imminent danger to the lifeboat right now and you can concentrate on the other things better if he takes care of keeping the boat in a straight line. Terezi  is being as bothersome as only she can, switching switches, pulling levers and pushing buttons with her legs as she scrambles through the control board, but KK has her covered, switching things back with reflexes of someone used to fix things in their matesprite’s wake.

You almost forgot about Gamzee. He is here, on the other bunk, pushed deep in the corner, head propped on the knees driven to his chest, looking at you. You know he looks at you even with a blindfold on, the stare is just so heavy. KK insisted to take him with the stealth team, probably because he doesn’t trust him anywhere out of his sight. You force yourself to relax and breath steady, but he is creeping you out for no apparent reason. You even consider changing the cabin, but it is only Gamzee for fuck’s sake.

Might as well just go with it before you change your mind.

Terezi taught you some things about being blind, using your sylladex one of them. You decaptchalogue a jar of mind honey, open in (DO NOT EAT THE MIND HONEY) and eat some.

The shit works amazingly fast. The jar slips out of your hand almost the moment your split tongue lick your fingers clean. The sudden pressure is unbearable. You burry your face in your hands, thinking only about not opening your eyes to release the tremendous energy now built up in your brain. The hands are getting wet, you are bleeding or crying, no, you are burning, that’s what’s important, burning and screaming silently – don’t you dare to open your mouth, you feel the tang of electricity and plasma on the tongue, you can spit the destruction just as easily as eyebeaming to the hell and back – and suddenly you turn your mind outside and it is glorious.

The lifeboat and all the space debris around it are crystal clear visions in your mind’s eye, set pieces you can move without even concentrating. Before you is the red ship, vast and complicated, a bit too complicated to add to your mind map, but so very, very inviting. You reach forward with your mind, sliding trough armoured plates of the hull, feeling sensor matrices and weapon bays, trying to paint a more detailed image. You can sense the weapons moving, turrets turning and for a second you concentrate on pushing them just the slightest bit off the course, exhilarated with the thought that you are now personally helping Feferi to stay alive instead of blowing your matesprite up. Then suddenly you brush against something bigger, stronger and sickeningly familiar, a red and blue energy wall surrounding the battleship and it notices you too, turning its intimidating attention to you and your puny attempts to manipulate its weapons.

And then your minds – you are suddenly certain it is a mind just like yours – connect and you lose.


End file.
